The American College and University

began telecasting lessons to schools in 1961.37 Along with educational television, other instructional technologies such as programmed learning, computer-assisted instruction, and educational videos were being used in the schools by the early 1970s. Today many high schools have their own television studio and channel. Closed-circuit television frequently augments preservice teacher education, providing student teachers with an instant, videotaped critique of their teaching.

The 1990s saw large-scale development and implementation of computer-based educational technology. Electronic data retrieval, the Internet, and computerassisted instruction brought significant change to instruction.38 Tim Berners-Lee, with Robert Cilia, developed the prototype for the World Wide Web in 1990, creating an electronic means of quickly disseminating and accessing information. An important development occurred in 1993, when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed Mosaic, a software program capable of electronically displaying graphics with accompanying texts.39 States and local school districts rushed to increase the number of computers in classrooms, improve Internet access, and provide increased technical support for schools. The US Department of Education issued “Getting America’s Students Ready for the Twenty-First Century: Meeting the Technology Literacy Challenge,” in 1996, to provide greater access to information technology and develop technology and information literacy skills for teachers and students.40 Today, teacher-education programs include preservice and in-service training in using educational technology in professional-development experiences.

5-5 The AmericAn college And UniversiTy

Colleges were established in North America as early as the colonial period of the seventeenth century, when Protestant denominations established church-affiliated institutions of higher learning. Believing that well-educated ministers were needed to establish Christianity in the New World, the Massachusetts General Court chartered Harvard College in 1636. By 1754, Yale, William and Mary, Princeton, and King’s College (later Columbia University) had also been established as church-affiliated institutions of higher learning. Other colonial colleges were the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Brown, and Rutgers. The general colonial college curriculum included the following: ● First year: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, and logic ● Second year: Greek, Hebrew, logic, and natural philosophy ● Third year: natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics ● Fourth year: mathematics and a review of Greek, Latin, logic, and natural philosophy41

37Gutek, An Historical Introduction to American Education, pp. 224–226. 38Allan Collins and Richard Halverson, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009), pp. 66–90. 39Robert Cailliau and James Gilles, How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For networking among teachers, see Kira J. Baker-Doyle, The Networked Teacher: How New Teachers Build Social Networks (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011). 40See Office of Educational Technology, US Department of Education, at www2.ed.gov /about/offices/list/os/technology/index.html. 41John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 2–38; also, see Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2006); and David J. Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007).

land-grant college A state college or university offering agricultural and mechanical curricula, funded originally by the Morrill Act of 1862. Today, many institutions originally established as land-grant colleges are large multipurpose state universities.

The University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson, was the model for the modern state university. Jefferson saw the University’s purpose as encouraging the “illimitable freedom of the human mind . . . to follow truth wherever it may lead.”42 Since the University of Virginia opened in 1825, states have been establishing colleges and universities. Along with the state colleges and universities, churches continued to establish liberal arts colleges, especially in the new states that entered the Union. Thus, the pattern of both state and private institutions of higher learning was established in the United States.

In the 1850s, critics of traditional liberal arts colleges argued that the federal government should provide land grants to the states to establish more practical agricultural and engineering institutions. In response, the Morrill Act of 1862 granted each state 30,000 acres of public land for each senator and representative in Congress. The income from this land grant was to support state colleges for agricultural and mechanical (engineering) education.43 Land-grant colleges and universities today are typically large institutions that include agriculture, teacher education, engineering, and other applied sciences and technologies as well as liberal arts and professional education. Still another important development in higher education came when Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 as a graduate research institution based on the German university seminar model.

The two-year community college is among the most available and popular highereducation institutions in the United States. Some two-year institutions originated as junior colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when several university presidents recommended that the first two years of undergraduate education take place at another institution rather than at a four-year college. Others developed from the initiatives of high school administrators to provide courses in special subjects such as bookkeeping and vocational training for their recent graduates. After World War II, many junior colleges were reorganized into community colleges, and numerous new community colleges were established with broader functions of serving their communities’ educational needs. States developed strategies that calibrated the two-year community colleges with their four-year colleges and universities as comprehensive systems of higher education. Community colleges tend to be highly responsive in providing training for technological change, especially those related to the communications and electronic data revolutions, as well as to the general educational needs of the people in their localities.

Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (the GI Bill) in 1944, near the end of World War II, which marked a major change in the student population in American higher education. To help readjust society to peacetime and reintegrate returning military personnel into the economy, the GI Bill provided federal funds to subsidize veterans’ tuition, fees, books, and living expenses. College and university enrollments expanded between 1944 and 1951, when 7.8 million veterans used the Bill’s assistance to attend technical schools, colleges, and universities.44 The result launched a continuing trend to open higher education to more diverse and previously underserved groups.

Since the 1960s, a massive growth of American higher-education institutions occurred as a fully articulated system of community colleges and four-year colleges and universities developed in the United States. However, higher education today faces the issue of the rising cost of attending college and student indebtedness.

42Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), pp. 344–345. 43Benjamin E. Andrews, The Land Grant of 1862 and the Land-Grant College (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1918). 44Gerald L. Gutek, American Education 1945–2000: A History and Commentary (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2000), pp. 9–14.